UK Cannabis Oil Use Doubles In One Year

Cannabis oil is getting almost as popular as tea and biscuits, or divorcing from the European Union over in jolly old England. According to reports from the Cannabis Trades Association UK and the Daily Mail, the number of Britons partaking of cannabis oil has doubled in the last year, from 125,000 to a quarter million.

By their estimates, cannabis oil is picking up roughly 1,000 new users every month. Besides the shockingly rapid expansion of CBD oil, the data comes with a few other surprises. For instance, would you have guessed that of everybody getting in on hash oil, most (65%) are women? That’s extremely different from demographics of cannabis use in America, where a pothead is roughly twice as likely to be male as female.

And what exactly caused this massive spike in CBD oil, particularly amongst women? It’s not such a mysterious question once you consider that UK government advisors made a policy change on the stuff in October 2016, noting that CBD indeed has a “restoring, correcting or modifying,” and creating a framework to become a regulated, licensed CBD distributor.

However, the government then “back-tracked on its position just weeks after,” according to the Mail. At that point, the laws on CBD oil became kind of vague and fuzzy (something the UK has in common with its prodigal nation, the US).

As of now, CBD oil distributors find the easiest way for them to do business is to sell their cannabis oil as a food supplement. At least that works in England and Wales. Scotland has still not been legalized for sale, though (confusingly) some people are still legally prescribed cannabis in Scotland.

One other thing the UK and USA’s governments have in common is that, though they make a lot of regulations concerning how you buy and sell and use marijuana, they don’t actually know that much about it. That’s why Mike Harlington of the Cannabis Trades Association is calling for greater research and education on the plant, so as to reduce the stigma for patients who may be in need of its benefits.

“We’ve known about the endocannabinoid system for 40 years or so but it has been ignored to a greater or lesser degree,” Harlington told the Daily Mail. “In a lot of cases, as soon as you mention ‘cannabis’ the stigma is obvious… Cannabinoid deficiencies are starting to become understood by the medical world, and it is slowly becoming obvious that cannabinoids like CBD are actually essential for general health and wellbeing.”